Back to the labs, boys

My new job involves quite a bit of work with natural language tools which try to group, summarise or classify text fragments. I am aware that sometimes these tools produce odd results, because in the end they’re not really intelligent – they’re driven by statistics.

Still, it made me laugh when I had a quick play with Google Sets, a tool which tries to predict additional entries for a set based on a few entries that the user supplies. I decided I would go easy on it the first time, so I gave it the following innocuous set: “hat”, “handbag”, “wallet”, “keys”.